General Motors said on Tuesday that it made $3.1 billion in profit from July through September, a year-over-year decline of more than 7 percent that was partly due to the six-week strike by the United Automobile Workers union.
Just a few hours after the company released its results, the U.A.W. said it was expanding the strike to G.M.’s largest U.S. plant, in Arlington, Texas, where 5,000 of its members walked off the job. The plant produces several large sport-utility vehicles, including the Cadillac Escalade and the Chevrolet Tahoe.
Before the strike was expanded, G.M. said the work stoppages had lowered its earnings before interest and taxes by about $200 million in the final weeks of the third quarter and about $600 million since the fourth quarter started on Oct. 1. The automaker also estimated that the strike could cost it $200 million a week going forward, a number that will likely grow given that the strike now includes one of its most profitable plants.
“We continue to be optimistic we will be able to reach an agreement as soon as possible,” G.M.’s chief financial officer, Paul Jacobson, said in a conference call with reporters, but he declined to say whether the company believed it was near a deal on a new contract with the U.A.W.
On Friday, G.M. gave the union a contract offer that included a 23 percent increase in wages over four years. That would lift the standard U.A.W. wage to more than $40 an hour from $32. At that wage, an employee working 40 hours a week would earn about $84,000 a year, not including extra pay for overtime or profit-sharing bonuses, which have topped $10,000 in the past two years.
“They’ve demanded a record contract — and that’s exactly what we’ve offered for weeks now: a historic contract with record wage increases, record job security and world-class health care,” G.M.’s chief executive, Mary T. Barra, said. “It’s an offer that rewards our team members but does not put our company and their jobs at risk.”
The union’s strike, which has targeted specific sites owned by the three large U.S. automakers. Before the expansion to the Texas plant, the U.A.W. had idled a G.M. pickup truck plant in Missouri, a factory in Michigan that makes large sport utility vehicles and 18 spare-parts warehouses.
In the third quarter, G.M. earned almost all of its profit in North America, which is largely driven by factories in the United States staffed by U.A.W. members. Its bottom line was hurt by a 42 percent drop in profit from its joint ventures in China, a small profit decline in its financial arm and a loss from its Cruise division, which is developing self-driving cars.
Despite the strike, G.M. reported that its revenue rose about 5 percent in the third quarter, to $44.1 billion. It sold 981,000 vehicles globally in the quarter, about 15,000 more than a year earlier. In the United States, its vehicles sold for an average price of $50,750, a slight decline from the previous quarter.
Because of the costs of the U.A.W. strike as well as higher warranty expenses and the uncertain economic outlook, G.M. said it was withdrawing its previous forecast for full-year net income in a range of $9.3 billion to $10.3 billion.
The company’s quarterly results were better than analysts expected.
Mr. Jacobson said that G.M. hoped to introduce redesigned S.U.V. models that would be more profitable than those they were replacing, and that the company would save money by slowing its planned rollout of electric vehicles. G.M. recently said it was pushing back the start of production of electric pickups at a plant in Orion, Mich., to late 2025 from 2024, in response to slower-than-expected growth in sales of E.V.s.
Although G.M. is now planning a slower ramp-up of electric vehicle production in 2025, it still aims to be able to produce one million electric vehicles a year in North America by the end of 2025, Mr. Jacobson said.
“Our commitment to an all-E.V. future is as strong as ever,” he said.
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